Currently the discovery of a Live TV broadcast program relies mostly on the Electronic Program Guide, EPG, which is to be discovered and viewed by the user. The user in-turn will choose any one or the available Live broadcasts or transmissions from the EPG and tune to that specific channel. Channels that are not mentioned in the EPG are essentially inaccessible to the user, channels that could come from the Over The Top, OTT, for example, are usually not covered in the EPG, and if they need to be covered, a manual or semi-automatic method of Content Aggregation is needed to enter the relevant information into the EPG, usually done at additional cost to the IPTV Service Providers.
Having to manually aggregate and classify the OTT content adds a certain cost overhead to the IPTV operations. As live broadcasts on the Internet is usually not managed as strict as the professional TV industry, there are also possibilities of making last minute changes that may be overlooked by the IPTV service provider and thus not be able to update in time into the EPG, causing a dissatisfaction to the users.
Automatic OTT content aggregation relies on a business agreement with the content provider and often involves prior technical arrangement and case by case software development since there is no agreed standard way of updating the information to the IPTV Service Providers. All these developments add to the operating cost of the IPTV service and cause scaling problem to the service itself.